Seeing Red at the Big Green

Cheryl Senter/Bloomberg NewsBaker Hall on the campus of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

Dartmouth College has long been a go-to recruiting spot for some of Wall Street’s biggest firms.

But one Dartmouth undergraduate is fighting back, calling the financial recruiting process a brain drain that has “siphoned off some of our great minds into a dead-end field that sanitizes the intellect, offers almost nothing to human society, and conditions people to act in ways that are decidedly inhuman.”

Dealbreaker picked up on an op-ed column by Andrew Lohse in Dartmouth’s campus newspaper, in which the student rants about the proliferation of bank recruiting programs on campus, saying, “Dartmouth is not a vocational school for investment bankers, nor should it be.”

Related Links

Mr. Lohse inveighs against the “whispered promise of recruiting” that leaves “many undergraduates’ intellectual development at square one.” And the gloves stay off:

It’s glaringly obvious that there is an inherent connection between the tragedy of wasted minds at Dartmouth and the proliferation of corporate, consulting and “financial services” recruiting on our campus. And it’s a process that the college has a hand in, allowing or disallowing various corporate and financial entities access to its undergraduates.

Mr. Lohse also recounts the story of a friend who was paid $100 by Bridgewater Associates, the Connecticut-based hedge fund founded by Ray Dalio, to write a statement explaining why she did not participate in Bridgewater’s recruiting process for college sophomores. Bridgewater is known to recruit heavily from Dartmouth, and Greg Jensen, the firm’s co-chief investment officer, is an alumnus of the school.

It’s not the first time an Ivy League denizen has sounded the alarm on Wall Street’s campus reach. In the last year, student columnists at both Harvard and Cornell have taken aim at the bank recruiting process, a months-long courtship ritual that can include fancy cocktail hours, information sessions with executives and grueling rounds of interviews.

Mr. Lohse’s campaign to end Dartmouth’s reputation as a Wall Street feeder school may be noble, but it won’t be easy. As one recent Dartmouth grad told DealBook, “Dartmouth produces bankers like the N.B.A. produces slightly illiterate ESPN color commentators.” Which is to say, all the time.